Rondo Allegro (68 page)

Henry had been feeling the loosening of the cloth around his
head every night for months, followed by the rebinding by Perkins’ strong
hands. At first he had suffered the sensation that the bandages held the shards
of his cracked skull together. Gradually that sensation had gone away, to be replaced
by an increased impatience at the restriction.

The hated bandage was lifted away at last, and Henry kept
his fists tight on his knees, eyelids shut until the physician bade him open
his right eye. Light glared, making his eye water. Dr. MacAdam harrumphed and
muttered Latin tags interspersed with things like “Good, clear humors . . .
pupil contracts nicely . . . Now, what do you see?”

Henry squinted, fighting the impulse to open his left eye.
He saw a blurry round face under a white wig floating over his head. He
blinked, and the blur resolved into jowls framing a broad smile below a pair of
observant gray eyes.

He swung his head, and there Anna was, looking back at him
anxiously. He smiled, and felicity bloomed in his heart to see her smile back.
“I see my wife. The drawing room. A bit blurry, but better than nothing.”

“My lord, we will try the left eye now.”

“This one open or shut?”

“Oh, shut the right, shut the right. We will try them
together in a moment, but first we must watch the . . .” More
Latin.

Henry opened his left eye. There was the glare, in blurred
bubbles of light that winked into shadow. He blinked, rubbed his eye, and
blinked again. Shadows crawled nauseatingly. He thumbed the top of his eyeball.
A brief spray of tiny lights corresponded with an ache.

“Shadows,” he said.

“Now try both.”

Henry opened both his eyes, and turned his head slowly. Here
was Anna again, a little bit clearer on one side, but the other smeared into
blur. He could make out her sweet smile, and the tiny dimples in her cheeks.
Her smooth brown skin, its color enhancing the warm brown of her eyes—the brown
of mead, of amber, of polished wood in clear light. She looked back at him
steadily, and when he met her gaze, his heart gave a fierce beat. He leaned to
touch her hand. She returned his grip, a private promise: if he had been blind
he knew she would have pressed his hand exactly the same. She had married a
man, whether he saw everything, or nothing.

He turned his head the other way.

There was his mother, who had aged shockingly under her
well-remembered powdered hair, but she wore a widow’s cap now. How many years
had passed during which he had given her only silence in return for her
steadfast love? Guilt pulsed through him as he looked past her to a tall girl
with light brown hair done up in curls like Anna’s. Could that be Harriet? He
remembered her as a spindly twig with tousled braids. Harriet looked like John
at that age, save for the bright smile. John had never smiled like that.

Next to her, a golden vision who at first seemed
miraculously unchanged. A faint stirring in his heart, echo of the pain he had
felt when Emily’s image intruded in dreams, pulsed and then subsided. He looked
away, at Dr. MacAdam. “My left eye is next thing to blind. Is that it?”

Dr. MacAdam said a great deal about time, and blows to the
head, but what Henry heard was that the medical faculty had little more idea
than he did. He had expected no less. Until they could open a living body in
order to see its workings and set it to rights, there would probably always be
at best a combination of guesswork and some experience, and the worst being the
outright charlatans preying upon the credulous.

When MacAdam had run out of cautions and assurances, Henry
said, “It is better than I expected. I had prepared myself for the worst.”

“Wise, very wise,” Dr. MacAdam said.

It remained only to invite him to refresh himself, pay him
his fee, and send him off.

Henry said to Anna after Diggory had shut the door and
vanished into the depths of the house, “Tell me the truth, now. Do I look
terrible? Ought I to wear an eyepatch?”

She peered up into his face. “What would be best for you?”

“I hardly know. This side of the world is . . .
soupy. Perhaps an eyepatch would be less distracting to me, but what about
others? Did you—no, you have probably never heard of Captain Johnson’s book
about pirates. I read that as a boy. Made me want to go to sea.”

“To be a pirate?” Her eyes widened.

He grinned. “To fight them. But Nelson never wore a patch.
Here.” He looked around the entry hall. “I am going to reacquaint myself with
the house. No, bide here. After being nose-led for months, I am going to take
great pleasure in my own powers.”

He smiled down into Anna’s anxious brown eyes, sensing that
she wished to be by his side, but she offered no expostulation.

He set off to explore.

More had changed than he had thought. The house had improved
vastly since his departure. He could see John’s hand in the new balustrade, the
fine Egyptian-patterned papers above the wainscoting, and the furnishings in
the formal drawing room, chosen with an eye to pleasing color, and use of
space.

Was this John’s form of art? John had never liked music, but
he had always had a good eye for a painting, and for color and space. Before
his arrival, Henry had resolved, if he regained his vision, to rid himself of
all signs of his brother, but as he proceeded through his house, he felt the
old resentment draining away. John had been bad-tempered, though no worse than
their father; he had been profligate and arrogant, but he had paid the price
for all those things with his life.

Henry decided, in the time it took to reach the
well-remembered schoolroom with its sturdy, cheerfully shabby furniture, that
save his own bedchamber, dressing room, and the sitting room, he would not
change anything. The best of John could be seen all over the house, and he
would preserve that as a better memorial than that stone statue in the family
crypt.

In the schoolroom, Nurse, looking very old and faded, had
his nieces dressed in their best. The two girls, just emerging into girlhood,
dropped curtseys. The baby eyed him, lower lip protruding dangerously.

Henry backed away in haste, and tried to find some
conversation for these girls. He had not thought about them until now; no one
had brought them downstairs. But he knew that Harriet and Anna spent a great
deal of time with them.

“Are you looking forward to Miss Timothy coming to us?” he
asked finally.

“Yes, Uncle Northcote,” the eldest said, and the smaller one
echoed, “Yes, sir.”

“Good.” He had run out of things to say. With midshipmen,
there was an established routine when they first came aboard, but now, he did
not know where to begin.

He gave them an awkward nod, swung about, and nearly knocked
his left knee into the low table. He must accustom himself to being effectively
blinkered on that side. He let himself out, and almost ran into Emily.

“I don’t know them at all,” he said to her. “You scarcely
let them downstairs.”

“I kept them from disturbing you,” she said. Strange, how much
softer her voice sounded when he looked at those large blue eyes, her delicate
skin crowned by soft golden hair.

He let his breath out. “And before I came?”

She tried to guess at his mood, and failed. His tone was
indifferent, and she strove to reach him. “Nurse did well by them, better than
I could. I don’t know children,” she admitted. “They are loud, sticky, and
dirty. I look forward to them reaching an age of reason, and discourse. I will
enjoy introducing them in London, if they improve.”

“Pray do not let me hinder you,” he said, and opened the
schoolroom door for her.

She dropped a slight curtsey and passed by.

He continued on downstairs, Emily fading from his mind as he
sought Anna. There she was, so different from Emily. Her features, considered
singly, might not be accounted as perfect as Emily’s very English style, but
their
tout ensemble
had become dear
in an inexplicable way, and he gazed hungrily into her face, wanting to catch
the subtle changes of expression in order to divine her mood. Her happiness had
become of paramount importance to him.

They fell into their now-accustomed posture, arms entwined,
walking together as had become their habit. But this time he took the lead, and
she fell easily into the comfortable rhythm that he had learned to count upon.

o0o

Emily, who had gone in search of him in a rare and
desperate impulse, found him a short time later in the morning room holding
hands with the foreign creature, as if they were girl and boy plighting their
troth. They did not notice her; she shut the door softly and went away.

After a bad night full of terrible dreams, she rose late,
aware of the throb of a dull headache. She must get out into the open air. A
gallop would clear off the headache, if it would not clear her heart or head. She
rang for her maid to lay out her habit.

She was crossing the courtyard when once again something
flickered at the edge of her vision. She remembered the previous instance, and
glanced up at the row of long gallery windows in time to see a small figure flitting
across the wavering glass.
Justina?

She whirled around and ran to the side door, taking the
stairs two at a time.

When she reached the gallery, an impossible sight met her
eyes: the foreign creature and Justina prancing below the sedate portraits like
a pair of performers at Astley’s Ampitheater.

The control she had fought so hard to establish vanished
like smoke. “
What
are you doing with
my
daughter?”

The two figures at the far end of the gallery stopped and
turned, two pairs of wide eyes looking guilty. Emily advanced upon them, her
voice rising on every word. “How
dare
you turn
my daughter
into a
performing strumpet!”

Anna caught her breath. “Justina wished to learn the
ballet,” she said.

“Look, Mama,” Justina piped up. “I know all five positions,
and I can leap like this, and turn a pirouette—”

“Justina, go to the schoolroom.”

“Let us all go to where it is warm,” Anna suggested, hoping
that Emily would calm down if given a few moments. She knew she needed time to
collect her wits.

Justina gazed from one to the other, burst into tears, and
ran wailing from the gallery. Her voice echoed off the marble as she flitted to
the new wing, followed by Anna and perforce Emily.

Unfortunately, Anna’s movement served only to heat Emily’s
temper the more, as it appeared that she had taken control of a situation that
Emily felt justified in commanding.
She
was the one wronged.

When they reached the morning room, Anna shut the door. “I
am only teaching her the rudiments of ballet. That is all I know myself—”

Emily snapped her riding whip through the air to crack
against a table. “No one asked you to do anything to my children. I can
tolerate the singing lessons, as that is a necessity for young ladies of good
birth, as long as they do not make spectacles of themselves upon the public
stage.”

Anna gazed in shocked silence.

“Oh, yes, I know who you are.
What
you are. If you think you can—”

The door opened to Henry’s hand. “Anna, did I hear your
voice? Behold me reading the newspaper! I see here that there is a new comic
opera by Guglielmi to be presented in London. And not long after, there is to
be a benefit for Grassini. Did you ever hear her?”

He entered talking, newspaper in hand. But when he got far
enough in and lifted his head so his right eye took in the two women standing
stiffly on either side of the fireplace, he stopped.

Emily turned on him, all her determined resolves gone. “Did
you know that your wife is a common opera clown, and possibly even a spy for
the French?”

Henry squinted from one to the other, then said crisply,
“What nonsense you talk, Emily. ‘Clown.’ You have your mother’s terrible habit
of making everything and everyone sound worse than it is. My wife was a soloist
in a French opera company, driven to earn her living because I neglected my duty
to her, and abandoned her to the Hamiltons. I ought to have known better, in
retrospect.”

The dowager appeared at the open door. “I heard Justina
weeping all along the upstairs hallway. Anna, did she fall down during her
lesson?”

“You knew what was going on?” Emily turned her way.

“Nurse comes to my powder room every morning to tell me
everything,” the dowager said, coming in past Henry to face her
daughter-in-law. “She always has. We were agreed that Justina was getting quite
round-shouldered, and her learning to dance would almost certainly correct her
posture.”

“I see what it is.” Emily’s voice trembled. “You have all
united against me, and now you wish to turn my children against me as well.”

The dowager, much shocked, said, “That is impossible. You
are their mother. No one can take your place.”

“
She
is trying.”
Emily pointed her riding crop at Anna.

Hot resentment flared through Anna. She had to breathe out
twice to banish it; she struggled not to assume the burden of anger that Emily
wished to give her.
Engage and deflect
,
whispered her mother’s voice in memory. “Your children talk of nothing but how
much they wish you to see what they have learnt,” she said.

Emily’s face twisted. “Am I supposed to be pleased that you
would turn them into the sort of woman who makes a spectacle of herself upon a
stage for every low bumpkin to ogle and to bandy her name about? I would rather
shut them up in a convent.”

Henry turned his good eye from one to another. What was he
supposed to do here? On board his ship he knew exactly what to do, but he could
not court-martial a woman, or stop her grog.

He looked toward Anna, who half-lifted a hand. He understood
from her gesture that she deemed this her affair. He forced his voice to
mildness. “I will leave you ladies to settle the question.”